Wine Wholesalers' Leader Insults State Regulators in Pursuit of Cannabis Marketplace

Federal law ought to keep booze wholesalers out of the cannabis marketplace

It took but a single tweet for the newly installed president of the Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of America to declare that consumers can’t trust the state-based regulation of cannabis.

Based on a story in the Washington Post detailing a study that showed some cannabis products are not as strong as they are advertised to be, Francisc Crieghton, announced that consumers should not “trust anything they are told about cannabis products they consume.”

According to Creighton’s tweet, state laws and state cannabis regulators—a majority of whom are the same state regulators that oversee alcohol sales and distribution laws—aren’t engaging in “real regulation”.

What would be real regulation, you ask? Well, the booze middlemen have an answer to that. In fact, WSWA has devised an entire outline for what it considers proper and, presumably, “real” regulation of cannabis. Their proposal, delivered to congressional leadership, is a plan for federal regulation of weed based along the same lines that the Feds currently regulate alcohol.

What’s odd is that in promoting this plan Crieghton felt the need to denigrate and dismiss the work of state lawmakers and the same state lawmakers his organization tends to celebrate. That’s a mystery.

What’s interesting about the WSWA federal plan to regulate cannabis is that it endorses interstate self-distribution of cannabis by producers. This is something that WSWA strongly opposes when it comes to alcohol. As they write in their “Principles of Federal Oversight of the Adult-Use Cannabis Supply Chain, “A producer operating in State A may obtain a distributor FBP (Federal Basic Permit) in State B in order to sell its products to a retailer in that state.”

On the other hand, the WSWA cannabis scheme proposes that interstate sales and shipment of cannabis from producer to consumer be outlawed: “A producer can sell cannabis to a consumer in the state in which the cannabis is manufactured if permitted by state law. Sales and shipments from producers to consumers across state lines are not permitted.”

While I applaud WSWA’s seeming turnaround on the issue of producer self-distribution and look forward to that organization abandoning its self-serving opposition to the archaic prohibition on alcohol producers self-distributing, I am disappointed with their opposition to interstate sales and shipment of cannabis.

On the whole, WSWA’s plan for federal oversight isn’t all that bad, save for their prohibition on the interstate shipment of the product. For the most part, it’s well thought ought, as are their primary principles for federal oversight.

I’d only add one other provision to their plan: Entities holding a federal basic permit for the distribution of alcohol would be prohibited from holding a federal basic permit for the distribution of cannabis.

We already have a mere two companies that control over 50% of the distribution of wine and spirits in America. This is too great a concentration that confers far too much control over American alcohol producers, importers, and retailers by just two companies. Add to that their attempt to control cannabis distribution and the problem become even greater.

What I’m unsure of is how Francis Crieghton’s insulting state alcohol regulators and state lawmakers will go over with that group. He should probably know better. He has spent his entire career working for lawmakers or lobbying them and regulators. Now seems like an odd time to announce in a tweet that consumers can’t trust any work regulators and lawmakers have done in the states.